Biting the hand of Project Fear

Burning down the Labour party

Despite having a poseur streak a mile and a half wide, and a large collection of vintage suits, I don’t care what Jezza wears. I don’t care if he wears a tie, I don’t care if he does up his top shirt button. It’s the content that matters, not the packaging. Scotland was expecting the delivery of a socialist package from Jezza, we didn’t mind what the wrapping was like.

We thought Jeremy Corbyn with his white beard was the socialist Santa, he was going to deliver all sorts of goodies for the good boys and girls who, despite the frequent disappointments, really believed in the pot-holed Great British Parliamentary Road to Socialism.

And after all the excitement, after all the hype, and us waiting up all night like weans expecting a prezzie, we tear off the recycled wrapping to discover that Jezza has given Scotland Ian Murray – the MP for the people’s republic of Morningside, a man who makes a plastic action figure appear animated. But there’s other prezzies lurking in the package, there’s Tommy McAvoy, who’s not even evolved enough to count as a dinosaur, an arsonist, and a random Welsh guy who no one has ever heard of. Not even in Wales.

I’ve not been so disappointed since I was a wean and my granny gave me a big box containing my birthday present and I ripped it open to discover a pair of purple crimplene trousers, some nylon socks three sizes too wee, and a t-shirt bearing a golliwog logo. Mind you, my granny was an avowedly racist bigot, she was the one you were allowed to shove aff the bus. On top of that she was possibly the only person in the history of the universe with a poorer sense of style than Jeremy Corbyn.

Jezza doesn’t care how things look. Which is fine. But not caring how it looks that you’ve appointed Tommy McAvoy as your Scotland spokesperson in the Lords isn’t fine at all. Tommy McAvoy represents all that is wrong with the Labour party in Scotland, the cronyism, the entitlement, the expenses claims, the sheer unpleasantness. And I’ve not even mentioned the implacable opposition to any equal rights for Lesbian and Gay people. So thanks for that Jez.

No one knows why Wayne David has been appointed to the Scotland team, not even Wayne, although he may once have visited Rothesay on holiday. Wayne has a lower profile in Scotland than a limbo dancer who’s suffered a tragic accident with a road roller, and his profile in Wales isn’t any higher. His qualification for the Scotland brief would appear to consist of being a Celtic type, and viewed from Islington North there’s not much difference anyway. He’ll do, said the Labour leadership, he talks funny just like a Jock.

The new team who are going to bring Scotland back to the Labour party look very much like the old team, the Shadow Scottish secretary who looks like one of those rubber stress toys that you squeeze and their eyes pop out, the theropod notable only for evolving the concept of nest-feathering, and a random leek. The face of the new politics looks suspiciously like the old one. The Corbyn bandwagon has only just started and it’s already being shaken apart on the potholed road, heavily rutted by generations of time servers.

But that’s not all, as a bonus prize we’ve got Charlie Falconer, who has never held an elected position in his life and who owes his high office to once having shared a flat with Tony Blair. After over 10 years in office and an illegal war, the rest of the public are now equally familiar with Tony’s brown stained underpants, so it’s unclear what advantages Charlie possesses.

This wasn’t the worst though. Appointing Burn Mike Look At The Pretty Fire 85+/Watson of Invergowrie as your education spokesperson is a far worse faux pas than not doing up your shirt properly at the Cenotaph. It looks really bad because it is really bad. He’s a convicted arsonist who was sentenced to 20 months in prison and served eight for attempting to burn down a hotel full of people. The judge at the time said that he was a danger to the public. Yet despite this glowing record, Mike remains a member of the Labour party, and now he’s a member of the Labour party who has high office. He’s a beacon of socialism, apparently. And if you want to argue that he’s served his time and ought to be forgiven, then just ask yourself how outraged you’d be if Cameron had appointed an arsonist to his cabinet, to sit alongside the sociopaths and psychopaths who are already there.

I now find myself in the very uncomfortable position of agreeing with Fraser Nelson, the editor of the right wing Spectator and escapee from the Bide a Wee Home for North British Elocution where he sadly contracted a terminal case of irritable vowel syndrome. Agreeing with Fraser has hitherto been as implausible as Ruth Davidson saying that she doesn’t really like tanks, Iain Duncan Smith actually practising some of the Christian charity that he self-righteously preaches about, or Fluffy Mundell making a public statement that doesn’t make you want to slap him.

Fraser published a piece in his right wing scream sheet claiming that the Corbynet looked less like the fresh face of a new look at British politics, and a lot more like the results of scraping the bottom of a barrel of bad apples for foul smelling gunge. The truth is, large sections of the Labour party refuse to serve under Jezza, because they don’t want to be tainted when the entire project comes crashing down in a shower of socialist recriminations. Those politicans are the disease of Labour, if they don’t want to serve under a leader voted in by a large majority of party members and supporters, it’s them who are in the wrong party. Labour can’t help us if it won’t help itself. It’s not that there are bad apples in the Labour party, it’s that the entire orchard is rotten. It needs to be burned down so something fresh and new can grow. Perhaps that will be the real service provided by Mike Watson.

Meanwhile here in Scotland we already have our own democratic resistance movement, one which has already withstood the flames. This time last year the independence movement was under attack, literally. Unionist thugs attacked independence supporters on the streets of Glasgow, and the media dismissed it. If it had been independence supporters physically assaulting Unionists, they’d have been calling for the imposition of martial law. We survived all that, and we’re still here, still laughing, still singing, still marching. Today is the anniversary of the day that we started to fight back.

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Yeah, me too Sue. I just lost an entire mouthful of cereal, seemingly via my nose. And I’ll tell you something – projectile sultana making such an exit freaking HURTS!!! 😀

Paul, please for the love of everything no more talk about Tony Blair’s scuddy underpants. The utter crap coming out of his mouth is bad enough!

Personally, I do wonder whether Corbyn is playing a very long and. Very astute game here. He’s not a careerist time server, so he doesn’t have delusions of grandeur likely to go up in smoke (heh, Watson wiz ere). Therefore if he and Labour were to land on their arses he would have the least to lose. Part of me wonders (hopes? Dreams?) that Corbyn is going to reform the Labour Party by destroying it from the top down and rebuilding it. I actually think he’s got his head screwed on.

Then he goes and gives Watson and Falconer (Falconer?! Freaking Falconer?!?!) positions of prominence and I’m back to wondering what the hell kind of fruitbat Labour have unleashed on an suspecting public this time. And don’t tell me you haven’t thought it too: the sanity of a man who thinks this pair are a great idea should (and surely must) be questioned.

As for Jezza? Wish I could say I was disappointed, but you have to be hopeful to be disappointed and after Jezza’s showing on Scotland 2015, I was more apprehensive than anything else. It wasn’t that I regarded him a Blairite in disguise, which the man clearly isn’t. It was his breathtaking lack of knowledge of Scotland or Scottish politics. He wears his socialist ideals on his sleeve, they just happen to be born of his world and his world, his politics, is basically outside his front door. This is the man who wants to lead the ‘peoples/nations’ of the UK remember.

I mean just for a moment imagine asking Scottish Labour members (those that are left) for advice on Scottish politics, the Scottish Government or Scottish daily life. Or howzabout the cultural and political revolution we’re experiencing? Can you imagine Kezia or Ian Murray explaining any of that?

I understood that fire-raiser Watson’s appointment was for an Education post covering England, not Scotland since Education is devolved.
That makes his position worse–he hasn’t a clue about English education.

I am actually quite shocked that English Media have not made much more of that, than the fact that he is a WILFUL FIRE RAISER, the at is the Scottish legal term for what Mike Watson was found guilty of.

If I were Jeremy Corbyn and wanted to influence public opinion about the house of lords, I would appoint Charlie falconer and mike Watson to prominent positions to highlight the farcial, undemocratic nature of the whole shebang.

Great stuff.
The “random Welsh guy”.is Wayne David. Wayne is rather well known in Wales not for his political acumen but for the fact that he managed to lose the Rhondda seat to Plaid Cymru in the first Assembly elections in 1999. No mean feat. Old Wayne is not the sharpest tool in the shed. If he knows as little about Scotland as he does about Wales, I anticipate the SNP having some fun there. “The Man who lost the Rhondda”.
Vying for the title of most tragic representative from Wales in Corbyn’s inner circle we have:
arch anti-devolutionist, Don Toughig; Owen Smith, once labeled a “drug pusher” by a fellow Labour MP; Nia Griffiths who campaigned against Post Office closures in her constituency but voted for them in Parliament; Chris Bryant, the expenses king who posted a near naked photo of himself on the internet requesting a sexual liaison with whomever was available; and Baroness (Eluned) Morgan, whose political career was considered finished after she set up an absolutely toe curling website, including her singing, some years ago. Strength in depth indeed.
Begs the question; does Corbyn not have someone who can look into the background of these people?

If Corbyn (or anybody else in the Labour party) had anybody gallus enough to look into the background of their party colleagues,that “researcher” would have been disposed of immediately – probably into the House of the Living Dead, the repository for their embarrassing numpties for 100s of years. Why would they want anybody else to know?

I guess it was always enevitable that yet another naive Labour leader with socialist leanings would be consumed by the state apparatus of Westminster; it’s just a shame it happened in such a short space of time.
It’s starting to look like the Westminster Labour MPs will vote for the renewal of Trident again, and for the UK to be dragged into another war in the middle east. Not to mention backing the Tory welfare cuts, yet again.

Corbyn is too gullible and politically naive to be able to whip his party into voting for what he personally sees as a Labour party stance on anything at all.

I’m not sure I’d say Wayne David is rather well known for anything in Wales for I couldn’t think who he was until I saw your comment and I’m interested in politics. For the vast majority it would be Wayne who? I tend to think that Corbyn knows nothing about these people and got some duff advice. The talent pool of Labour M.P.s in Wales is very shallow. Chris Bryant, by the way, is a council member of the Henry Jackson Society.

I’m not sure it’s true that “Scotland was expecting the delivery of a socialist package from Jezza”. I know I was expecting nothing. Corbyn has no power to deliver anything. Why expect anything of him?

Well on the subject of Corbyn I have to agree with the fact that nobody seems to want to work with him, could that be because there is already a head of steam being raised to get shot of him?
I think the fact that he has appointed three lordships to his cabinet says much about his commitment to socialism, or perhaps it is English Socialism.

That was brilliant; and your descriptions of the selection of assorted Red Tory and other Labour no-hopers will be remembered as classics.

However, your comments about your granny seem very harsh. I presume she is quite old, i.e. a product of a different generation and a markedly different upbringing than today’s generation. Calling her an avowedly racist bigot, presumably because, among other things, she gave you a t-shirt bearing a golliwog logo, is quite ridiculous.

The older generation were brought up with such things as golliwogs, and children then could even collect them from jam jars. They were not thought of as racist, in any way shape or form in those days. I still don’t think of such things in racist terms, they are only old fashioned toys.

The only “racist” remark I ever made was when I was taken to Glasgow by my mother when I was about three years old. There was a black man sitting on the seat behind us on the tram, and I, having never seen a black man in my life, asked him if he worked down a coal mine. My mother apologised to him, but, as you might imagine, he did not take offence and actually thought it was quite funny.

Anyway, don’t pick on the older generation for some attitudes they may still have. Many of these attitudes were inculcated into them when they were young, such that that a lot of them still think that the so-called Union is the way to go. In other words, they were all bloody brainwashed from a very young age. Some, including myself, have moved on with the world, but allow for the fact that some of our older people can’t manage to do that. And stop picking on your granny.

You know I wouldn’t like to be in JC’s shoes, the very English term “sticky wicket” comes to mind.

As I see it, after a long period where both main parties promoted practically the same right-drifting policies, an ever-increasing proportion of the population became in effect disenfranchised and simply stopped voting. A bit like a thunderstorm, the charge built up but was diffuse, lacking a point where it could concentrate and discharge dramatically. A sort of political lightening rod.

In Scotland that happened between the referendum and the GE. It was manifested by the enormous growth in SNP membership and the following election success. That I think discharged the cloud in Scotland.

But in England there was no such resolution. Not until JC and the Labour leadership elections under their new arrangement. It would seem an unlikely situation, but it must be some measure of the charge that had built up over the years, that somehow that was the point of focus. Labour membership suddenly began to rise, and JC was elected at the head of ‘movement for change’.

But here’s the problem, well there are two really. First he can’t achieve much of anything in Scotland since his support base has already been ‘captured’ by the SNP and the indy movement. But his main problem is that his movement has arisen just after rather than just before a GE. So whatever support he has in the country he faced with a PLP made of largely of ‘pre-revolutionary’ time-servers, place-men and so forth. This will, sadly for England, make it very difficult for him to deliver. Will he stick to his guns and be sidelined or compromise and lose most of his following across the land?

So the really interesting question is what will happen to the wider movement if and when JC fails? Will it find some new way to manifest, or will it simply fade away as quickly as it arose, like say the Occupy Movement?

I am left wondering if Corbyn is a genius or just someone who has been handed a task which is way beyond his capabilities. I reckon the latter and that is sad because I get the impression that he is a decent person.

I just hope that his ineptitude brings some advantage.

He could do a lot worse than ask Nicola Sturgeon for a bit of guidance but I don’t suppose he will!